‘We offer a comprehensive portfolio for pharma industry’

Vmoksha Technologies, headquartered in Bangalore provides a variety of drug development application and infrastructure support services to world’s largest pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. B H Syed, Executive Director, Vmoksha, began his career in 1982 in TCS. Syed had a decade long association with TCS where he held various positions, before joining Fujitsu, where he headed retail and distribution group. After a brief stint with IBM as head of retail business and then as general manager in financial services, he joined Vmoksha in 2001. In an exclusive interview with R BabyManoj, Syed speaks about the trends in the industry. Excerpts:

What are the services offered by Vmoksha for clinical trials?

The clinical trials are conducted in different stages. Different aspects are examined at each stage. Impact of the drug including side effects are analysed. All these activities involve generating and maintaining a huge amount of data.

Various regulatory bodies like FDA and WHO need these data for providing clearance. And this data has to be presented in particular ways. That pattern recognition is not possible in physical reporting methods. Vmoksha provides business intelligence, data warehousing and data mining services for conducting clinical trials.

What are the cost advantages by using such software solutions in clinical trials?

Naturally there would be a cost reduction when the processes are streamlined. A lot of data generated from the result of clinical trials cannot be handled manually. That obviously is the major part of the value proposition in this case.

Do you offer software products?

No. We don’t provide software products. We provide only software services. We are providing services using standard products. We provide ETL model services.

How role does Vmoksha’s software services play in drug designing?

Our role comes in the area of data management and analysis of the clinical trials. We have the skills of supporting the clinical trials from the stage of drug design e.g. like putting the statutory concepts of the protocol into use.

It starts from developing the CRF (the data collected from each patient), and designing the database, collecting the data from the investigators, entering the data, and matching that with the laboratory information and making it suitable for further validation. There is a whole series of stages. We have the whole range of skills required for doing this. We also have the skill of filing the statistical report.

Most of your clients are from overseas. Could you tell more about them?

We have 15 clients from outside the country, mainly from Europe and US. We have around 10 clients domestically. We always prefer to have a smaller number of clients with larger parts of their IT budget. That is the reason we are dealing with a small number of clients. However, I can’t disclose the names of the domestic pharma companies. Sigma Corporation and People Soft are among our international clients.

Do you provide services to CROs?

At the moment we are not providing any services to CROs. Our clients are mainly from the pharmaceutical industry.

When was Vmoksha started? How old is the pharma division of the company?

Vmoksha was established four years ago. The pharma vertical is just one year old.

What is the percentage of Vmoksha’s revenue from pharma and healthcare sector?

Out of the total business of Vmoksha, pharma and health care together contributes around 30 per cent.

How do you plan to beat severe competition?

We are basically a complete service-oriented organisation. We do not necessarily look at only one opening. We are not a niche player. Secondly we are organised around verticals, which means we would do whatever is required in that vertical. It could be as simple as the ERP implementation, or it could be offering services for conducting clinical trials for a pharma company. Be it horizontal or vertical, we look forward to a more comprehensive portfolio for this industry.

What is the size of your company?

We have a strength of about 500 employees today. We operate in six verticals, including pharma and healthcare, retail and distribution, VSSI, which is in banking-related services, manufacturing, ISP segment, which is for software vendors and NGOs.

What are your future plans?

We would like to grow through greater customer accounts. By the end of this year, we will be able to attract three or four large customers in the pharma and healthcare segment: basically one customer per quarter. We expect that shall contribute around 50 to 60 per cent growth to our turnover.

– rbmanoj@expressindia.com